How to Optimize Your Content Marketing for Social Media

It’s extremely hard to get your content to go viral, as it requires a whole lot of luck. Rather than waiting for that one Reddit front-page worthy content piece to blow up, content marketers should invest the time into taking the below important (and relatively easy) steps to increase the click-through of each and every one of their content pieces.

Facebook and Twitter (and Google to an extent) all allow users to control their branded image across social channels, which helps increase a content’s allure and social sharing. Want to increase Facebook and Twitter shares and click-throughs? Read on!

Facebook Open Graph Meta-Tags

Facebook shares account for nearly 25% of all referral traffic to web content. But what does your content look like when it gets shared? That depends on whether you have the appropriate Facebook Open Graph metadata on your site! If you share the main CNN.com site on Facebook, you’ll notice a random image from the page is pulled in as the thumbnail.

CNN can get away with this because it’s a well-known organization, but for many sites, a random, pixelated thumbnail image appearing by default is going to hurt your brand and reduce your readership. So how do you fix this?

First, check to see if your website is already configured for Open Graph tags by entering a few of your page URLs into Facebook’s Debugger. This tool will show what meta-data your site has, and based on this data, what your URL will look like when shared on Facebook. If, like CNN, you’re missing meta-tags and your preview is drawing in a random image, you can fix your problem in one of two ways:

Option 1: Get a plugin or module for your CMS, and configure it to fill in the Open Graph fields:

Below are five major Open Graph meta-tags that you should include (though there are plenty more you can read about here!):

og:title – The header/title that you want to show up when someone shares your page

og:url – The canonical/permalink of your page

og:description: – A description of your page

og:image – The preview image that should show up when someone shares your URL.

og:type – The type of content on your site (common types are “website” or “article”)

Here’s an example of the Open Graph meta tags as seen in this page’s source code:

Look at what it looks like when you share Triblio.com on Facebook!

Twitter Card Meta-Tags

Like Facebook’s Open Graph tags, Twitter Cards are another way for you to optimize the appearance of your content when it gets shared. You can check if your pages have this setup by using Twitter’s Card Validator. If your site does not have Cards setup, it’s a good idea to do so. Again, there are two ways to do this:

Option 1: Get a plugin or module for your CMS, and configure it to fill in the Twitter Card fields:

twitter:card – The type of Twitter Card you want. You can feature images, text summaries, apps, and more.

twitter:site – The Twitter handle associated with your brand or page.

twitter:description – A description of the page. This falls back to the Open Graph og:description if missing.

twitter:image – The preview image that should show up when someone shares your URL. This falls back to the Open Graph og:image if missing.

twitter:url – The canonical/permalink of your page. This falls back to the Open Graph og:url if missing.

If for some reason you had to choose between implementing Open Graph or Twitter Card tags, you’d be best off picking Open Graph. When Twitter can’t find certain tags, it will fall back to values from the corresponding Open Graph tags, as noted above. Not every Twitter Card tag has an equivalent Open Graph tag though, so be sure to include tags like twitter:card and twitter:site!

Here’s an example of some Twitter tags from our site’s header. (We didn’t include some tags like twitter:url since we are alright with Twitter using the Open Graph equivalents!)

Note well: Authorship, which used to be one of the most powerful ways to make your content stand out in Google search results, was recently discontinued. Don’t spend too much time following now outdated guides on getting authorship setup, as it probably isn’t worth it!

Conclusion

Adding the aforementioned metadata will help you both standardize and optimize your brand image as your content is shared on social media. It will increase your click-through, increase secondary social sharing, and help the content you write reach a wider audience.

It can be overwhelming to digest all the above information if you’re new to SEO concepts or building websites in general. If you’re looking at displaying content in a way that will foster sharing and conversions, request a demo of Triblio’s content marketing software! We allow the creation of content-rich hubs that are made with social sharing and the above points in mind. On the other hand, if you’re an SEO guru and have something to add to our article, let us know in the comments, or tweet @Triblio!